Inland Northwest Beacon Community Selects Orion Health HIE Solution to Support Diabetes Program

Beacon Community of the Inland Northwest (BCIN), a regional collaboration led by Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS) (Spokane, Wash.), has chosen the Orion Health Health Information Exchange (HIE) solution with disease management feature set. INHS will work closely with the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Orion Health to help meet high standards on a condensed timeline for building out an existing HIE and implementing a disease management program. BCIN is focused on helping the regional healthcare community establish and adhere to care coordination programs for improved diabetes management and tracking. Orion Health technology was selected to further enable health information exchange across the 14 county regions, support the delivery of best practice care plans, and facilitate quality measurement and reporting back to providers and special interest groups.

Utilizing the Orion Health HIE solution with disease management capabilities, INHS will integrate health data from additional healthcare providers located across a broad rural region including eastern Washington and northern Idaho. The comprehensive disease management capabilities allow healthcare workers to better track compliance with diabetes management protocols and benchmark progress against individual, regional and national standards.

The program is intended to build toward the longer term goal of reducing unnecessary hospital admissions and lowering the cost of healthcare delivery across the region while improving health outcomes across a number of chronic conditions. One of 17 Beacon Communities identified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), BCIN is receiving funds to help update the current regional IT infrastructures to better share information related to the care of chronically ill patients. Federal Beacon program guidelines mean that organizations receiving this funding must meet a stringent implementation timeline and demonstrate progress toward a sustainable program. Orion Health HIE solutions will help BCIN meet the requirements laid out by the ONC and deliver measurable improvements in patient outcomes.